4 comments about Model: The Complete Guide for Men and Women.

1. This book is quite useful for anyone who knows very little about the modeling industry, and wants to know exactly what to expect if they decide to persue modeling, as either a hobby or a career. This book is extremely thorough, answering any questions you may have about the modeling industry. It even gives names and addresses of popular modeling agencies around the world!!! The make-up tips were somewhat useful, as well. After reading this book, I had the confidence to send my portfolio to a local agency. I have been in 5 print advertising ads and 2 television commercials here in Detroit. I am so greatful I read this book!!!



2. My wife and I have been in the modeling business for over 15 years and have started thousdands of models and actors. Marie's book is one that we suggest to all our aspiring talent. It is a great overview of the industry!



3. I guess everybody's an expert, but I found the hair and make-up techniques recommended in this book silly and outdated. Models today wear no make-up (maybe moisturizer or lip balm)to castings unless they're coming directly from a booking. Ditto for hair-'do's. The book could have addressed skin care and healthy lifestyle for today's young people rather than touting superficial strategies from the 'experts'. Do you want to know how to become a model or how to get a date?



4. I've met Marie Anderson Boyd and listened to her speak at a model search. When I got back home from the search, I checked her book out at the library. I learned soooooo much from that book. If you're going to get into modeling, then this book is a MUST HAVE!! You will learn so much that you won't know what to do with all the information. Everything from how to get an agency to represent you to diet and exercise tips. It's not a dry read either, I COULD NOT put it down; very interesting and at times humorous too

5 comments about Utopia: by Sir Thomas More (The Bedford Series in History and Culture).

1. I bought this book because it is a revered "classic". While I am sure More's intent might have been good, and his ideas even acceptable during his time, the main problem with his theory is the lack of freedom allotted to the individuals in his utopia. This sort of thing just does not fly these days.



2. I needed Utopia for a class, so whether or not I enjoyed it is pretty much irrelevant. I doubt this book is being read for personal enjoyment, but it wasn't a bad read.



3. This was required reading for a graduate course in the Humanities. A great story and important historical work in literature. History of Utopia begins with Thomas Moore's book in 1516 he coins the phrase Utopia. Ideal societies have been around before like Garden of Eden, city on a hill. For Moore the idea of utopia was intended to be an ironic one. One of the problems you are faced with when reading his utopia is that you cannot really tell when he is serious and when he is being satirical. He writes on the border of the lyrical and satirical, you cannot really tell when he is trying to be funny or serious. The other problem is the Thomas Moore who speaks to us in the story is not the Thomas Moore who actually lived. He wrote himself into a character. He is intending it to be ironic. Utopia is Greek for "Good Place, and "no place." He is punning an ironic two-sided term he clearly intended irony when he wrote this text, which provided the foundation for a new genre for social representation. Now, according to Lewis Mumford, who wrote the book "The Story of Utopia" 1922, one of the first comprehensive studies of Utopian representation in Western Civilization, the word Utopia signifies human folly or human hope, the vain hope of perfection. The vain hope of remaking our own imperfect natures, so that we can establish the blissful harmonious communal life. On one hand, he is entirely playful and paradoxical. Thomas Moore could be bigoted (against Protestants), small minded, not a saint as portrayed. Among all the things, he was a great wit, great sense of humor. On the other hand, it seems that Utopia could be a reflection of his devout Catholicism. He has been represented as a Roman Catholic martyr. In which case you want to take him seriously, altering the model of menses a set of new aims for moral and social objectives. Of course, Moore's death is important to consider in this life he is glorified in the film, "A Man for All Seasons." He was a Renaissance man, he was a lawyer, statesman, Christian humanist a classical scholar an advocate for women's rights he was also Henry 8's Lord Chancellor.
   
   In 1514, he was sent to Flanders to negotiate a wool treaty and while there, he meets and befriends Peter Giles who is the town clerk of Antwerp, and allegedly tells him "It is my intention to write a book about the way a country should be governed according to my principals. But, it is dangerous to write about those things in England while king Henry the 8 wrath is so easily encouraged, I could perhaps write that I met an old sailor in your house and introduce that man as a globetrotter, who had traveled all over the world and had seen places that we don't even know the existence of. What he had seen there was so unbelievable as compared to the life in Europe that the islands the countries he had visited would seem to belong to another world. Therefore, the title of my book will be "Utopia" a word that means "no where." That sailor will have traveled all over Europe and lived sometime in France Germany, and England. That is why he could compare the ideal community he got acquainted with in Utopia, to the ones he got to know in our countries, and that way I would keep myself out of the matter." After he returned to London, he wrote the fist chapter. Now, what would that tell us about the Utopian imagination, the creation the public presentation of a Utopia? Moore was beheaded in 1535; he would not recognize marriage to Ann Boleyn as lawful to the church. In 1534, Henry becomes head of the church, but Moore remains loyal to pope. In 1935, Moore is canonized. We have to take Moore's religion very seriously. Moore thought Protestants should be burned, he was greedy and proud, not a perfect man. Yet he had this wish for a Utopia.
   
   All utopian fictional ideas of mythic proportion occupy kind of distant realm of the afterlife, myth, faith that unite all of these elements in a matter that is so rich and potentially illuminating and invaluable for scholars students that are interested in working across boundaries and in understanding and exploring the value of working across boundaries. Societies woven and inhabited by populations some of them very select, the exceptionally virtuous or blessed in some cases getting there requires a metaphysical transformation, in other cases it requires a harrowing journey that has to be understood as some ways metaphorical and some ways literal. There is always a sense that to reach Utopia requires a transformation of the human self how do we get away from our flaws, how do we get away from our seemingly inevitable and invariable nature of our being.
   
   These places offer anecdotes to painful and tragic realities to human existence. They are historical in nature you cannot understand any utopia, whether it is represented in a sci-fi movie, or novel or feminist utopia; they must be placed in some kind of a historical context. A fascinating proposition to explore, all utopias all acts of the utopian imagination strike us as constituting in one manner or another statements, critiques or observations about the world we occupy at that given moment. Therefore, any utopia is a reflection and study of the world that we are occupying at that given moment and what we wish it were rather than what it is at that moment. Therefore, utopia is a deeply and inescapably a historical manner organizing the human imagination. I don't think any utopia works in a fixed and eternal way because for every generation and every age they have to imagine their own utopia. Of course utopian experiments were not just talking about fiction or wishing it were so, were talking about actual Soviet Revolution of 1917, were looking at movements looking to bring about radical profound social and political changes that are so deeply utopian in nature. So utopians are aesthetic, philosophical, sociological, they are imagined and fictional, but you can look a history and find attempts most of which failed to bring about these kind of communities that Emerson, Thoreau, these 19th century American egalitarian attempts to create the ideal agrarian society. 1960 hippies reawakening movement of going back to the natural and living off the land. Even today's green and ecological revolution you find in them utopian aspects that resonate so richly with the history of envisioning the ideal society, an ideal place.
   
   Oscar Wilde once said "A map of the world that does not include Utopia, is not even worth glancing at for it leaves out the one country at which humanity has always landed, and when humanity lands there it looks out sees a better country set sail. Progress is the realization of utopias." So when we talk about utopias we are not only talking about a desire or a wish or a longing for perfection, we are talking about an order of progress, a way in which we intend to advance, a way in which we envision or imagine improvement and progress. A progress narrative, psychoanalysis is utopian. Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is a scientific expression of the utopian imagination. The idea that where id was, the ego shall be. The idea of a talking story, the idea that we can master our neurosis that we can harness them that we can move from unconscious behavior to conscious behavior. Marxism and all the grand philosophies of the 19th and 20th centuries are grand utopian narratives. Feminism is a grand utopian narrative in and of itself.
   
   Recommended reading for anyone interested in history, psychology, philosophy, and literature.



4. I was happy to receive my book in great condition. The process was easy and shipping took but a short time. I was very pleased.



5. When Thomas More wrote UTOPIA in 1516, he attempted to postulate how human beings could create a society that would be as nearly perfect as possible. At least that is what is commonly believed that he tried to do. For those who have read his book, they immediately see some troubling issues. The first sticky point is to define what he meant by the term "utopia." Did he mean a totally democratic state; such as the ancient Greeks had, in which each citizen had direct voting in all issues? Or perhaps More was simply updating Plato, who saw his Republic as a society governed by a carefully selected breed of rulers who would rule an equally carefully selected brood of subjects? Or again, was More attempting to strike an impossible balance between the burgeoning rise of Renaissance humanism with a stifling set of conflicting Christian religions? It is too easy for moderns to suggest that he was merely holding up Utopia as a fun-house type mirror by which he wished his contemporaries could see themselves reflected as zigzag images and perhaps be ashamed enough--or exhorted enough--to alter their behavior for the better. We today are tempted to judge his meaning by 20th century standards, which do not always draw a clear distinction among the virtues that More's Renaissance contemporaries took for granted but today we dismiss as outdated, or worse, irrelevant.
   
   The book itself has two parts. The first includes More, who places himself in the book as a traveler to Antwerp who meets Peter Giles, who in turn introduces him to Raphael Hythloday, a name that Moore punningly notes that in Greek means "nonsense speaker." Hythloday mentions that he journeyed with Amerigo Vespucci to America and along the way encountered the mythical land of Utopia. This first part is slow reading in that More does little more than discuss some general reforms of potential benefit to England, most of which involved agrarian, economic, judicial, military, and criminal justice matters, all of which obliquely suggest that what worked in Utopia might work in England as well. It is the second part that has generated considerable controversy as to what More really meant his readers to grasp.
   
   For those who come to the second part of UTOPIA and expect a 16th century version of Eden, the results are profoundly shocking. When More details the basic government setup as one in which its citizens are living in a ruthless police state with the death penalty meted out for a variety of reasons, readers suddenly grasp that Utopia may not be all that different from Plato, who similarly envisioned his society as one free from the degenerating influences of poetry and the basic tenets of free speech. When this sobering concept sinks in, then the term "utopia" begins to lose its cache as a synonym for a land of unrivalled happiness. But if these readers look at Utopia through the eyes of More and not their own, then a different Utopia arises. As an educated classicist fully versed in traditional Christian orthodoxy, More was trained to evaluate any social structure according to the non-Christian but humanistic Cardinal Virtues of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice, and then compare these to the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. More made it clear that both sets of virtues were needed to make Utopia an enduring entity. More was not optimistic enough to truly believe the social inequities in England (or Utopia for that matter) could be so easily eliminated merely by rearranging the pieces of the social pie. What humans of any society needed to ensure genuine freedom from tyranny was mastery of the far more unmanageable Seven Deadly Sins. Of these More suggests that by downplaying the importance of gold, by limiting the nature and amount of material wealth, and by forcing all citizens from the highest to lowest to share in all types of drudgery, that the worst of the sins, Pride, will be vanquished, thus leaving Utopia as ready to endure in the face of what to other and less advanced societies would be tantalizing but deadly temptations.
   
   What emerges then in Utopia is a mythical land based on equally mythical virtues that can house a citizenry such as never existed in human history nor is likely to. But More felt that even if his contemporaries managed to alter for the better their profligate ways, then a small sliver of Utopia might result. For More and perhaps for us today, that might be good enough.

No comments about Selling Fashion: The Digital Photographer peers into the shop window.

3 comments about A World of Earrings: Africa, Asia, America (Ghysels Collection).

1. I approach this book purely as an artist seeking inspiration for my own jewelry designs, and for this I give A World of Earrings five stars. The photography is beautifully clear and sharp, offering precise detail under excellent lighting. The jewelry pieces are shown quite large, allowing you to see all the details. It is true that the descriptions are placed in the back of the book, and it might be a little inconvenient for some to flip back and forth between photos and descriptions, but I actually applaud this design decision because I prefer to see the jewelry itself without distracting blocks of text. As an artist, not a jewelry historian, I have to say this book fulfills all of my expectations and is well worth the price.



2. The book is beautifully illustrated with full color photos that are exceptional in quality. I think it would have been helpful to show how some of the earrings are actually worn, either on a mannequin head or a real person. One other feature I found inconvenient was the location of the descriptive text , which is clear at the back of the book, instead of under or in back of each illustration. The reader has to keep flipping back and forth between the full-sized photo in front and the text at the end. However, it still provides a good general survey of ethnic earrings from Africa, Asia and the Americas.



3. ...as with the other volumes published thus far about the Ghysels collection (World of Rings, Splendor of Ethnic Jewelry), one is left thirsting for an accompanying volume of scholarship. Broad introductions to the regions represented and short captions relegated to the end of the book are what we're given instead, often without dates for the pieces shown. A gorgeous and inspiring visual resource- still one of my favorites on ethnic jewelry, for the sheer beauty of the pieces included- but a bit frustrating to the jewelry historian.

1 comments about Quilts, Coverlets, and Counterpanes: Bedcoverings from the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts and Old Salem Collections.

1. although this is not a huge book, it contains a wonderful collection of late 18th through 19th century bdecoverings, from woven to embroidered to quilted. the examples are generally beautiful as well as historically interesting.
   
   the introduction is brief but informative, defining the various terms used for bedcovers over time and including fascinating evidence of the value owners put on their textiles. there are also short biographies for the makers of some of the bedcovers, and even portraits in whatever medium was contemporary. also included are a few photos of textile tools, some handwritten weavers' draughts (and cloth woven from them), and a handwritten notebook for embroidery stitches.
   
   the only drawback for me is the book's brevity--i wanted more, more history and biography, and details of the bedcovers, more of the collection.
   
   quilters, weavers, those interested in textile and social history will find this book informative, enjoyable and inspiring.

1 comments about Carried Away: All About Bags.

1. There are reasons I like this book and reasons that I am disappointed. The reason that I am disappointed is that I thought that this book was going to have lots of pictures of purses from different eras. The reason I like this book is because it is more than just a book with pictures of purses. "Hmmmm..." you might be thinking. "Whatever does she mean?"
   
   I love looking at bags in fashion magazines. I thought this book was going to be like that...only longer. Instead, it contains the history of bags, the relationship between bags and culture, the psychological meaning of different bags, and dare I say it, the philosophical perspective of bags. Lest you think I am being sarcastic, I really think the author Chenoune does a good job covering these issues in a tongue in cheek manner. "Carried Away" shows the bag as more than just a fashion trend. Although the book does show examples of the bag as woman's fashion accessory, such as the ubiquitous Hermes bag, the book is more of an art book.
   
   "Carried Away" is divided into several sections. My favorite section is about purses in the movies. The author chose still pictures from certain movies. Then, Chenoune explains how the choice of the purse by the costume designer relates to the characters in the movie. Basically, what does the purse say about the psychology of the character and the mood in the scene? I also like the section that shows pictures of different bags and their uses in history, like the painter's bag.
   
   I think for many people this is going to be a book that they pick up in the book store and browse, but not buy. However, I think that other people intested in the bag as an art form, a cultural indicator, or a historical benchmark will find this book interesting enough to read. Therefore, I would not recommend buying it sight unseen, but it is definitely worth a look.

No comments about Metropolitan Fashions of the 1880s: From the 1885 Butterick Catalog.

1 comments about Children's Handkerchiefs: A Two Hundred Year History (Schiffer Book for Collectors).

1. What a great book for the serious hanky collector! It is very complete and the interesting and progressive history of children's hankies will keep you captivated to the very last page. The pictures are awesome and the descriptions are just perfect. The only small complaint is that I wish the price guide would have been with each hanky. I loved it and highly recommend it to anyone interested in collecting hankies!

1 comments about English Embroideries--16th & 17th C. (Ashmolean Handbooks).

1. The book has information on design, stitches, and materials for 20+ embroidery pieces in the Ashmolean but the title is misleading. There are no pieces that are definitively dated to the 16th century. All are from the 17th century, 12 of which are pictorial works of biblical scenes. Two blackworked coifs and a forehead cloth are "late sixteenth to early seventeenth century." Everything else is later, including a few purses, samplers, some glove gauntlets, and assorted pictures and ornaments, some from as late as the 20th century.
   
   Because of the size of the book the pictures aren't very detailed, but they are in color. For a few items, there is enough detail to see individual stitches.
   -Discussion is a bit heavy on conjectured symbolism and meaning of the design figures.
   -Includes short stitch and term glossaries.
   -Shows some prints from which designs were possibly taken.
   
   If you're interested in *17th* century embroidery this can give you a taste of it.

No comments about Wedding Dress across Cultures (Dress, Body, Culture).